Will the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement usher in an era of corporate behaviour defined by enhanced respect for workers, local communities and the environment? Or will it prove to be just another PR exercise? Perhaps surprisingly, linguists may have as much to say about the issue as economists and corporate lawyers.

The CSR movement is by now well established in Europe. Although less developed in the US, it is beginning to make its presence felt there as well. Its basic premise is that the responsibility of a corporation extends beyond the traditional objective of providing financial returns to its shareholders. Instead, corporations should also pursue such broader objectives as sustainable growth, equitable employment practices and long-term social and environmental well-being - often characterised as "stakeholder" interests.

The three essential CSR activities are partnership, dialogue, and reporting. Partnership typically involves a relationship in which a prominent non-governmental organisation lends its expertise - and its "brand" - to a corporation that seeks to improve its practices in some social or environmental area.

A current and controversial example is Greenpeace working with the British utility npower to monitor the latter's offshore windmill project. Greenpeace faces scepticism about its involvement with a company that also generates nuclear power. The charity counters accusations that it risks "selling out" by stressing that it remains a "campaigning NGO".

Most companies that claim to be active in CSR now sponsor "stakeholder dialogues" that bring together workers, governments and citizens of the places where the company does business, and interested NGOs to discuss issues of mutual concern. In yet another surprise, British American Tobacco (BAT) has emerged as one of the stars of CSR dialogue, engaging with stakeholders ranging from European health authorities to South African office workers to Central American farmers.

Almost half of the world's largest corporations now produce social and environmental reports in addition to their financial reports. Although the reports vary enormously in tone and content, they tend to be elaborate and glossy, helped along by an expert community of consultants and "auditors". Until now they have been voluntary and thus unregulated. They remain so in the US, but in Britain this month new government regulations came into force requiring publicly traded companies to identify and disclose social and environmental risks that are financially material. Exactly what form these reports will take remains to be seen.

So two of the three principal CSR activities consist entirely of language. This alone should make them of interest to linguists as areas of research. But CSR also has great political significance. There can be little doubt that CSR activity in the US and Britain is intended at least in part to pre-empt more invasive government regulation of corporate behaviour of the kind already in force in countries such as Germany and France. The theory is that if companies can be seen to be taking social and environmental issues seriously, and in the process to be gaining the imprimatur of well-known and traditionally confrontational NGOs, the governments of the US and Britain - whose dominant stock exchanges give them the greatest leverage in the corporate law sphere - will leave them to their own devices.

The question that some linguists and professors of law have begun investigating is whether all this process is yielding any substance. The early answer is that it is doing so, but not in the ways that corporate reformers might hope.

In the dialogue area, companies such as BAT employ a discourse that is affirming and therapeutic. But it is at the same time a discourse of control. A critical preliminary question is who gets admitted as a stakeholder, an issue on which the law provides no guidance at all.

During a presentation at a recent CSR conference in Los Angeles, one of BAT's representatives described this, perhaps ominously, as the "mapping and classification" of stakeholders. BAT speakers also talked of using consultants to select stakeholder participants by determining "who exactly the key players are"; extensive preparation in order to "systematise" the dialogue; and achieving "consistency across regions" in order "to avoid sending different messages to different parts of the world".

Maybe this is just an honest effort at bringing a bit of order to a potentially chaotic multi-party conversation. But, as the French social philosopher Michel Foucault famously pointed out, to organise is also to discipline, to control, and to limit. What a company might characterise as the valueneutral "facilitation" of stakeholder dialogue can be seen as an exercise in control - control over who participates, how things get said and, consequently if indirectly, what gets said. At the end of the day, will stakeholder dialogues amount to anything more than the suppression of nasty but potentially productive arguments?

CSR reporting has also tended to be an effort to control debate, in this case by identifying and pre-empting potential criticisms. ExxonMobil's 2003 report, for example, all but defines the CSR problem away, with an Adam Smith-like conception of social good: "Our activities and those of others in private industry deliver economic benefits and help advance worthwhile societal goals." The report goes on to apply the rhetoric of engineering to ExxonMobil's CSR activities, stating that "wider involvement in society" will be governed by "hard" analysis, the "rigorously applied management systems" that mark its core endeavours. "Soft" critics need not apply.

The CSR movement is upon and among us. Present indications are that it might well be successful in heading off any legal impositions more onerous than the modest reporting requirement recently enacted in Britain. If CSR is to be an important instrument of the new governance, society needs to understand what it is and how it works. In what is both a rare opportunity and a civic duty, linguistics is uniquely positioned to provide that understanding.

· John M Conley is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina, jmconley@email.unc.edu. This
article is based on his recent keynote address at the 50th Anniversary Meeting of the International Linguistic Association in New York.

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